The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Rida, Muhammad Rashid (1865–1935)

A Syro-Egyptian publicist, publisher, and anticolonial activist of the Arab Renaissance (al-nahḍa), Rida founded the influential Cairo-based Pan-Islamist journal al-Manar (The lighthouse; 1898–1935) as well as a host of educational societies and political organizations, both public and secret. Known as an Islamic reformer, he was the self-proclaimed heir and biographer of Muhammad ‘Abduh (whose partial exegesis of the Qur’an he edited and serialized as Tafsir al-Manar) and the frustrated disciple of Afghani (who died before Rida could join him). While his sociopolitical commitments were enactments of the reforms called for in his journal, his trademark advocacy of a critical return to the Qur’an and prophetic traditions (the so-called Method of the Pious Predecessors, manhaj al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, which earned him his Salafi designation) evolved no scholarship. Rather, it laid the discursive foundations of the emerging public sphere of his time.

Born to a Sunni family of Sayyids in the coastal town of Qalamun near Tripoli in the then-Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire, Rida learned to read and write and memorized the Qur’an at the local school before briefly moving to Tripoli’s Turkish-language government school. He then spent eight years at the private school of the Azhari shaykh Husayn al-Jisr, which offered a blend of the Islamic and positive sciences, graduating in 1892. Prior to his emigration to Cairo (1897), he contributed to several Tripolitan and Beiruti newspapers while furthering his education both at the hands of scholars and in the columns of scientific popularization journals such as al-Muqtataf (The selected).

It was the reading of Afghani’s and ‘Abduh’s subversive and short-lived Parisian newspaper al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa (The firmest bond) that ultimately gave him a sense of purpose, inspiring him to publish a reformist journal that would guide the world’s Muslims on the path of unity, progress, and civilization. From Ghazali’s Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din (The revivification of the religious sciences), the second most influential reading of his youth, Rida retained a commitment to reorganize Islamic sciences but disowned Sufism, which he squarely equated with devious popular religiosity in the wake of a traumatic experience with the Naqshbandis.

Rida grew up witnessing the gradual encroachments of the Western powers on the territories of Islam. While missionarism and colonialism were the biggest external foes, the servility toward the past of the ‘ulama’ and the uncritical emulation of the West by the Europeanized (mutafarnijūn) constituted the biggest internal ills and were subsumed by the double-edged concept of imitation (taqlīd). When it came to combating missionarism, however, Rida had no qualms with imitation. He thus pioneered an Islamic missionary institute (Dar al-Da‘wa wa-l-Irshad, 1912), which included in its curricula the sociology of the papacy and the patriarchate, and he oversaw the establishment of a Muslim replica of the Young Men’s Christian Association (Jam‘iyyat al-Shubban al-Muslimin, 1927). A fervent Ottoman constitutionalist, Rida saw in the caliphate the only defense against the increasing powers of the nation-state with its reliance on foreign legal codes. Up until ‘Abduh’s death (1905), he therefore relentlessly exhorted the ‘ulama’ to codify the shari‘a and advocated a synthesis in legal rulings among the four Sunni schools of law (talfīq). After ‘Abduh’s death, Rida’s pledge not to engage in politics (‘Abduh’s condition for supporting al-Manar) became obsolete, and he openly thrust himself into the fray. At the heart of Western civilization and progress, Rida had recognized the power of organizations.

In 1905, he organized the Ottoman Society for Consultation (Jam‘iyyat al-Shura al-‘Uthmaniyya). In 1908, he spared no speeches or articles in favor of the reinstated Ottoman Constitution. In 1911, however, despairing of the anti-Arab policy of the Committee of Union and Progress, he founded the Society for Arab Union (Jam‘iyyat al-Jami‘a al-‘Arabiyya), a Pan-Arab secret society that defended the interests of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In 1912, he cofounded the Party for Ottoman Decentralization (Hizb al-la Markaziyya al-Uthmaniyya). Although he was on the margins of Egyptian politics, he played an active role in Syrian politics, from the Young Turk Revolution (1908) until his death (1935). As president of the Syrian Congress (1920), he negotiated Syrian independence with the British and the French. He was a member of the Syrian-Palestinian Delegation in Geneva in 1921, sat on the political committee in Cairo during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–26, and participated in the Islamic Conferences of Mecca (1926) and Jerusalem (1931).

Perceived as a crucial opinion maker by contemporary political players, he was contacted by the British during World War I to spread the idea of independence among the Arabs. He also communicated the Arab opposition to the creation of an independent Jewish state to the representatives of the Egyptian and Levantine Jewish communities and corresponded with Chaim Weizmann, the first president-to-be of Israel. He even managed to remain on good terms with both Sharif Husayn of Mecca and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz b. Sa‘ud, envisioning the latter as the most capable leader of a revived caliphate (and a much-needed patron for a permanently indebted al-Manar).

Rida’s later shift from Ottomanism to Wahhabi Arabism was more pragmatic than doctrinal—his publication of Hanbali authors such as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) notwithstanding. More broadly, his championing of premodern scholars, whose ideas he selectively paraphrased or flagrantly distorted, was consistently elusive. An example of selective paraphrase is his treatment of Najm al-Din al-Tufi (d. 1316) and Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi (d. 1388), the most radical exponents of the legal theory concept of public interest (maṣlaḥa), while distortion is evinced in his portrayal of the 18th-century Yemeni reformer Muhammad al-Shawkani as a supporter of legal analogy (qiyās). A new professional in search of legitimacy, Rida affiliated himself with authorities who afforded him the concepts needed to mold public opinion and to push for political institutions that would resist wholesale Westernization: maṣlaḥa allowed him to speak in the name of the public good and qiyās to justify all-out legislation on an Islamic basis. By “journalizing” not only Islamic legal concepts but also genres such as the fatwa, Rida ultimately severed a formidable jurisprudential corpus from its procedural basis, reducing it to a limited and ready-to-use lexicon. A pragmatic move aimed at confronting external and internal challenges to Muslim society in a colonial setting, Rida’s “Salafi turn” in effect empowered the future postcolonial literate masses to Islamicize indefinitely.